When I was 24 years old, I was diagnosed with a type of diabetes called LADA (Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults). It’s a form of type 1 diabetes in which you can still make a tiny bit of insulin as your immune system slowly destroys the insulin-producing capability of your pancreas.
A few days after my diagnosis, I took some diabetes care classes that my hospital offered. The nurses told me I could eat anything I wanted, but with limits, of course. Their recommendations included bread, pasta, fruit, and potato. I was confused. I thought carbs would be eradicated from my diet forever. I just shrugged and happily followed the nurse’s advice.
To no avail, my blood sugar (glucose) levels were still on a see-saw for weeks after the class. Something wasn’t right and I needed better answers. So, I did what any smart (yet desperate) person would do in my situation: I googled “best diabetes book ever”. I was led to a hardcover on Amazon called The Diabetes Solution. It was written by Dr. Richard Bernstein – a badass pioneer in diabetes research for normalizing blood sugars since the 1960’s.
His book was everything I needed for proper blood sugar management. What I learned can change the game for type 1 and 2 diabetics. Even if you aren’t diabetic or have had your doctor tell you that you’ll eventually get diabetes, and want to know how to prevent it, you’ll want to keep reading.
Here’s the first of three important rules I learned from Dr. Bernstein which helped me bring my A1C level from 13.4 to 6.0 in less than 3 months.
Rule
#1: Exercise Consistently with More Emphasis on Anaerobic Training
To get excellent blood sugar readings, being active isn’t enough. You need to assess the type of exercise you’re doing and how it’s affecting your levels.
When I was first experimenting with exercise and glucose, I noticed that some exercises brought my sugar down only during the duration of the activity and other exercises gave me relatively high readings for the moment but then excellent readings long after the workout – even days after!
What was happening?
The key here is something called insulin sensitivity. When someone has high insulin sensitivity,their body quickly accepts and uses insulin to move glucose from the bloodstream to the muscles. It’s good at cleaning out the excess sugar from your blood. This is a good thing and we should be striving to achieve this if we want excellent blood sugar readings.
On the other hand, when someone has low insulin sensitivity, they are insulin resistant. This means that it’s much harder for their body to move glucose into the muscles. The unused sugar is left floating around in their bloodstream and increasing over time as they eat more – causing all sorts of damage to the body. In his book, Dr. Bernstein said that the best way to improve sensitivity is to lose fat and gain more muscle through (you guessed it) exercise.
Aerobic Training
Exercises can generally be broken down into two categories: aerobic and anaerobic. When you are exercising aerobically, you’re expending energy slow enough that your muscles aren’t deprived of oxygen and can keep moving. This allows you to do the activity for a long time. Some examples of aerobic exercises are jogging, cycling, rowing, and walking at a steady pace that you can keep. Glucose levels usually drop during aerobic exercise.
Anaerobic Training
When you exercise anaerobically, you are expending energy at a rate such that the oxygen you breathe is not enough to fuel your muscles (the term anaerobic means without oxygen). At that point, your body kicks into a different mode to keep up with the energy demand. Some examples of anaerobic exercises are weightlifting, sprinting, running uphill, climbing stairs, pushups, pull-ups and usually anything involving HIIT (high-intensity interval training).
Note that all these workouts cannot be done nearly as long as aerobic activities, and they all have that deep burning feeling and make your lungs and muscles feel like they’re on fire. This burn from anaerobic training is where the key to glucose control lies. Why?
Anaerobic Training Increases Insulin Sensitivity
When you do anaerobic activity, your muscles rip (microscopically) and need to be repaired. For simplicity, you can say that glucose is the glue that makes these repairs and insulin is the funnel that takes the glucose from your bloodstream and feeds it to your muscles.
Essentially, when your muscles tear, your body creates a need for glucose. As you’d expect, the greater the muscle tear, the more glucose is needed to fix it, the more sensitive your muscles become to the presence of insulin.
With the resulting increased insulin sensitivity, the smallest amounts of insulin can funnel large amounts of glucose to your muscles and quickly reduce your blood sugar levels. This is why exercise, especially anaerobic activity, is so vital for excellent blood sugar control.
If you lift weights or train anaerobically on a consistent schedule, you can experience excellent insulin sensitivity for many hours, even days, after the workout.
Yes, you continue burning up glucose and calories when you’re not doing anything – something that aerobic exercises cannot match.
So, does that mean you should throw out your running shoes and only lift weights? No.
You must use the benefits of both types of exercises. Aerobic activity is still good for short term results of lowering blood sugar (within an hour or less). Anaerobic activity is good for long term results of good blood sugar levels for long periods after the activity, depending on how intense the workout was and the amount of starchy carbs you eat after the workout. For example, if my sugar is high at the start of my exercise then I’ll walk, jog, or jump rope to get it down – aerobic activity. If my sugar is at a normal level (around 100), then I resort to anaerobic training to build on my sensitivity. Whatever you decide to do for exercise, use the benefits of both aerobic and anaerobic training to control your glucose levels. But be smart about it and keep an eye on your sugar so it won’t go too high that it’ll push you into ketoacidosis (a condition in which there is a buildup of acids your blood) or too low that you’ll pass out. Only you know how your body responds.
Try It
Now that you know how the different types of exercises affect blood sugar, lay the groundwork for your next workouts to get your insulin sensitivity up. If all you’ve ever done at the gym is run the treadmill or other low-intensity exercises, then give anaerobic training a shot. My two favorite things to do is HIIT and weightlifting. Often, I’ll mix aerobic and weightlifting movements with goals of finishing a prescribed workout within a time limit or finishing a certain number of rounds of a workout in a given amount of time. Adding a time limit to a workout can easily drive up its intensity. Completing 100 air squats in 10 minutes is not the same as completing 100 air squats in 3 minutes.
I’ll be posting some anaerobic training workouts in upcoming posts but there are tons of HIIT programs on the internet you can get started with right now – CrossFit, Beachbody’s Insanity, a HIIT workout generator, cross-training books on Amazon, or just Google HIIT workouts.
If you’re serious about blood sugar control, anaerobic training is essential for getting outstanding results. Try it for at least two weeks to kick up the sensitivity and see how your blood sugar responds. If you have any questions or experience with anaerobic training, I’d love to hear about it.
[…] Five years of type 1 diabetes and fervently monitoring my health has shown me that the body operates much more efficiently (physically and metabolically) when I do high-intensity (anaerobic) exercises like sprinting, weightlifting, CrossFit, and interval training. As uncomfortable as this type of physical training can be, it leaves steady-state aerobic activities (like running or walking) in the dust. Problems with blood glucose regulation become almost nonexistent when I incorporate anaerobic activity and a low-carb diet. I’ve written about it here. […]